Dell Networking OS 9 powered by NetBSD
I've stumbled across this somewhere on Facebook in the
japanese version, but this information is
available in english as well
from the Dell website:
``Designed to deliver high performance in the largest and most demanding IT environments in the world, Dell Networking OS 9 has been tested and hardened to meet stringent requirements for reliability, scalability and serviceability. OS 9 supports the full portfolio of Dell Networking data center switch products and enables you to build cost-effective, end-to-end networks while reducing operational complexity.

The NetBSD kernel provides a stable operating system and performs efficient resource management via the HAL architecture, allowing it to deliver superior levels of concurrency, memory allocation and process scheduling. All other applications run as independent and modular processes in their own protected memory space.''

FTOS is the operating system software that runs on Force10 switch/router product lines, including the E-Series, C-Series and S-Series platforms. Based on NetBSD, FTOS leverages a distributed, multiprocessor architecture that delivers highly scalable protocols and reliability. By delivering the same OS across its entire switch/router line, Force10 ensures that customers benefit from stable code, a consistent configuration environment and simpler software management. ''

Create Bootable Live Linux USB Drives with UNetbootin:
``UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to burn a CD. You can either let it download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or supply your own Linux .iso file if you've already downloaded one or your preferred distribution isn't on the list.''

And of course we all know that NetBSD is Linux, right?
See the list of supported distributions:

The
homepage
mentions that NetBSD 4.0 is supported, maybe someone wants
to give them an update on what's up with NetBSD 5.0?
Would be nice to see that on the list!

With the move from XFree to X.org, the X server for the DNARD Shark's
NetBSD/shark lost support for accelerated X.
Thanks to Michael 'macallan' Lorenz,
hardware-accelerated X for NetBSD/shark is back now:
``I finally got around to start working on an Xorg driver for the IGS CyberPro
20x0 family found in rev. 5 Sharks, Netwinder etc. - currently the driver is
built only on shark and supports only the VL variant found there. Adding
support for PCI chips is trivial though, just needs extra probing.
The driver supports autoconfiguration ( X -configure should yield something
almost usable, only DefaultDepth needs to be adjusted).''

Jed Davis has committed the
RAIDframe parity Summer-of-Code project.
See
his posting
for the details. The project
``drastically reduces
the time RAIDframe spends rewriting parity after an unclean shutdown by
keeping better track of outstanding writes (thus, "parity map"). The
tech-kern archives have more details [...]

This feature is enabled by default on all sets (other than RAID 0). It
can be administratively disabled with the new "raidctl -M" flag, which
is described in the changes to the raidctl(8) man page; however, the I/O
overhead for updating the parity map is expected to be unnoticeable in
practice.''

So much for now. There is more in the pipe, but that will have
to wait for now. Good night!

Catching up - what happened in NetBSD-land between mid-August and mid-November
OK, I've been slacking^Wbusy for the past weeks, but I hope things
will get a bit better now. For a start, here's a catch-up of the
things that accumulated in my inbox in the past ~two months:

Google Summer of Code is over for some time, but apparantly
no final report has emerged so far (shame!). Still, a number
of individual status reports came by on the official lists:

I know of at least one other project (uvc) that has completed but
that I didn't see a report here - maybe I've missed it. Anyways,
GSoC was another big success this year. Thanks, Google!

Speaking of Adam Hamsik and Logical Volume Management (LVM), Adam
has continued his work in that are, and he has written a device
mapping library that interacts with his kernel driver. This
allows to interact with his GSoC project without using any GPL
code!
See Adam's posting for more details.

Force 10 Networks, producer of 10gbit switches that use an operating system
based on NetBSD, have added a new feature as part of their FTOS operating
system: VirtualView, which provides virtualization of Force 10 based equipment.
From the xchange article: ``Force10 Networks Inc. this week introduced VirtualView software for benchmaking, troubleshooting and managing virtualized environments based on Force10 gear.''

Following the latest hype in portable computers, NetBSD has
created a netbook
page that intends to list models and the extent to which they
are supported. Your contributions are most welcome here! (Contact
me for sending updates and hardware :-)

Zafer Aydogan has made RSS feeds available for CVS commits to
single files - see his mail to netbsd-users
for more details.

New security advisory were released that I've missed in my
last update:

A project that's been ongoing for quite some time is the move from
"old-school" loadable kernel modules (LKMs) to new-style kernel modules.
Important changes include the fact that modules can be either linked
into the kernel at build time, or loaded into the kernel at
runtime from the same file. Also, the bootloader was modified to
load modules after the kernel, e.g. for a RAM-disk like the one
that is used by the INSTALL kernel.

In the same line, some parts are starting to be moved out of the
GENERIC kernel, and installed as modules that can be loaded by
the new framework then. The start is made
by
POSIX semaphores as a first step and proof-of concept,
even if
some details are still under hot debate, e.g.
what the file system layout for modules is, and if the belong
to the kernel and its build process, or to the userland.

While talking about splitting the kernel into modules, Antti
Kantee has continued his work to move parts of the kernel into
userspace, in particular running file system code as userland in
his RUMP,
and puffs and (Re)FUSE works.
The idea is to provide the interfaces that file systems need in
the userland, and the result is that you can run code that used
to run inside the kernel in userland now.

NetBSD has shipped XFree in previous releases, and people who
wanted to use X.org had to install it from pkgsrc. That's all
fine, but to get a modern X, one had to compile things, as no
precompiled binary packages are made available for many
platforms. This is changing now, and NetBSD is getting X.org
integrated via a reachover infrastructure which is also enabled
for crosscompiling.

The "user interface" for this is still in flux, but after some
detour ("build.sh -V MKXORG=yes", without -x), "build.sh -x" now
builds whatever X is considered the default for the
platform. Some platforms already default to use X.org as X, and
more will come, as changes that were made to NetBSD's copy of
XFree are adopted to X.org.

As X.org is at Revision 7 now, it's installed in /usr/X11R7,
which will lead to a lot of interesting effects. pkgsrc is
already prepared for the new layout, but there are still many
minor details that will need adjusting to the new directory. If
you find one, post your patches to tech-x11.

Besides the GNU C compiler, there's the BSD-licensed Portable C Compiler
around for some time now. It doesn't offer the same support as
its GNU cousin yet, but this may change now:
The BSD Fund
is currently doing a fund drive to get money to enhance PCC.
The goal is to raise $12,000US to improve support for core
compiler functionality as well as support for C99, gcc
compatibility and the amd64 architecture. See
the project page for further details.

As the final point today, a word on NUMA support from Christoph
Egger. Non-Uniform Memory Access is needed in massive parallel
systems where some nodes have RAM more tightly associated than
others, where the RAM is further away, resulting in different
access times for different regions of memory. In order to support
this, Christop Egger has made first steps.

His example implementation uses information from ACPI, and shows
some heavy dmesg-pr0n from a 16-core machine with four
sockets. Yumm!

So much for today. With the NetBSD 5.0 release cycle started, I'd like
to encourage everyone to test the release branch, report errors, send
patches as well as beer and choccolate to make this the best
release that we've ever had.

NetBSD-based Force10 switch receives 2008 Product Innovation Award
From the
Business Wire press release:
``Force10 Networks(R), the pioneer in building and securing reliable networks, today announced that Network Products Guide, a Silicon Valley Communications publication and leader on technologies and solutions, has named the C300 resilient switch a winner of the 2008 Product Innovation Award for the Ethernet switch category. The award recognizes vendors worldwide whose product innovation brings critical evolutionary changes to
business and the IT industry.
[...]

The Force10 C300 was recognized for innovations that enable enterprises to cost effectively bring performance characteristics typically reserved for enterprise-class data centers to the enterprise LAN and mid-sized data centers. The passive copper backplane of the C300 incorporates patented technology originally designed for Force10's high performance E-Series family of switch/routers and eliminates a single point of failure as well as reduces system-level power consumption.

In addition to the resilient design, the C300 also supports FTOS, bringing additional reliability to the network. Based on a NetBSD kernel, FTOS is inherently stable with modular processes that provide a highly fault tolerant environment by limiting faults to a single process without impacting the performance of others. With advanced inline diagnostics and service tools, FTOS also simplifies troubleshooting and software upgrades while mitigating configuration errors that result from human error.

Force 10 unifies NetBSD-based FTOS operating system across entire product portfolio
Citing from the
fibresystems.org article:
``Force10 Networks®, the pioneer in building and securing reliable networks, today announced that its modular operating system FTOS is now available across its Reliable Networking portfolio of switch/routers, bringing consistency, stability and flexibility to the enterprise network. With support for a common interface across the TeraScale E-Series, C-Series and S-Series, Force10 is enabling customers to reduce their total cost of ownership by simplifying management, reducing unplanned downtime and optimizing application availability.
[...]

To build reliability into its operating system, Force10 leveraged the Unix-like NetBSD kernel, which provides inherent process modularity and fault isolation. Additionally, Unified FTOS is based on a single source code and release train, simplifying software maintenance and upgrades. To guarantee the integrity of FTOS, Force10 has implemented a rigorous QA process that ensures the code is stable prior to being made available to customers. The advances in operating system design and rigorous schedule and QA policies combine to provide optimal application availability to the enterprise.
[...]

FTOS support is now available on the
Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of chassis-based switch/routers (E1200, E600, E300),
C-Series family of distribution switches (C300, C150) and
S-Series access switches (S50, S50V and S25).''

NetBSD hires Andrew Doran for full-time SMP development
OK, here's another one that I can copy verbatim, as I
did most of the work on this -- it will show up on the
NetBSD website shortly, too:

* NetBSD hires Andrew Doran for full-time SMP development

The NetBSD Foundation announces that it has hired Andrew Doran to work
full-time on improving symmetrical multi-processing (SMP) in NetBSD.
This work is made possible through a generous donation by Force10
Networks and internal funding by The NetBSD Foundation.

Andrew Doran is an independent, Dublin based Unix systems consultant
with special interest in building scalable systems. He has been a
NetBSD developer since 1999 and is currently working on the transition
from a big-lock SMP implementation to a fine-grained model, which
allows multiple CPUs to execute code in kernel context simultaneously.
Hiring Andrew full-time will boost work in this area, with the final
result of a SMP implementation that is ready for tomorrow's
multi-core-CPUs.

Force10 Networks is a pioneer in building and securing reliable
networks. The Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers and
the recently introduced C300 resilient switch rely on the NetBSD-based
FTOS to deliver the reliability, network control and scalability
required to build application ready networks.

The funding will be for two months initially, and The NetBSD Foundation
would like to extend this period. As a non-profit organization with no
fixed financial backing, this is not possible without donations from
individuals and companies. To realize our plans, $10k would be needed
short term, with a goal of raising $15k or more eventually.

If you would like to donate to the ongoing effort of keeping NetBSD the
most portable Open Source operating system, please consider supporting
us! Donations via Paypal can be sent to paypal@NetBSD.org, or visit
our donations page at
http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/
for more
details. Donations are tax deductible in the United States.

Force10 Networks uses NetBSD to build Software Scalability into FTOS Operating System (Update #4)
OK, citing from the
news item
I've managed to get up on our webserver, despite some hassles:

``Force10 Networks® has
leveraged NetBSD® as
the foundation for the Force10 Operating System (FTOS). Based
on the open source UNIX-like system, FTOS provides the software
scalability and resiliency that powers the Force10 TeraScale E-Series® family of
switch/routers.
See our full press
release for more details.

Some technical details that did not make it into the press
release: Today, many of the worlds largest Gigabit Ethernet and
10 Gigabit Ethernet networks depend on Force10 Networks. The
Force10
TeraScale E-Series switches/routers support this by
providing features like massive scalability, 1260 Gigabit
Ethernet ports or 224 Ten Gigabit Ethernet ports per
chassis. The machines are battle tested and provide full
function L2 switching and L3 routing.

Internally, they are equipped with PowerPC CPUs, and for
communication, dedicated 100M Ethernet networks are used in each
system that connect the Route Processor Module (RPM) and line
cards that are for system control.
There are three active CPUs on the primary RPM, and a CPU on
each line card that are all active in the control
plane.

While data itself is forwarded by the hardware, management
overhead exists if you consider running 1.500 VRRP groups, 600
OSPF neighbors, BFD on thousands of ports, ARPs on thousands of
ports, collecting statistics on thousands of ports etc. All
this work is done by the
Force10 Operating System, FTOS''.

Force10 Networks
TeraScale E-Series Products

The release of this was coordinated for today with
Force10 Networks,
and I'm told that the same press release will occur on
several news sites. I'll put some URLs here when I know them. :)